Beautiful young men stand in small
groups on street corners, immaculately dressed like Edwardian teddies,
staring down the ancient buildings that dare to rise above them which seem
to be crumbling before their eyes with age, trembling to sustain the bits of
beauty that remained in their arches. In those walls, boys selling their
bodies to pay the rent, giving themselves to older men who, like those
beautiful aging structures denying their own mortality, refuse to be seen as
anything less than deserving of czars, of the royalty they’ve known in these
dirty streets - princes disguised as rent boys, their blue blood covered
with bones and sinews below the bruised knuckles and black eyes. Young boys
like countesses, bodies like Myrons, smooth as marble. Nude backs arched as
they kneel and sweat behind theatres, in alleyways and strangers’ beds. They
stride through town like dandies on holiday. Their jokes keep strangers at a
proper distance, and their quiet cynicism keeps them happy. When their
neighbors are off to bed, they are off to a fête. When their fathers are
catching the train into the city, they are catching the train home -
sleepily chatting or dozing in each other’s laps, rejoicing in a life
without money, but a life with charm and style. They do not sleep on silk
but they sleep with someone who stayed with them when what they had together
was all they had, and that was worth more than rubies.

Arm in arm, speaking gravely and close
like lovers, looking like a reflection of the heavens, they walk like world
travelers down the streets they grew up on and never left, out of spite,
because when they were children they had promised they would leave, and
never come back to their parents’ pristine houses of furniture as old and
ugly as their hearts and those dimming lights. But then they had found each
other. Like searchlights in a dark and endless sea, they had rescued one
another from what none of them could see but only felt in the asphalt and
floorboards of dirty one-room apartments where they slept and ate and drank
their way into the beds of strange men when they had no where else to go.
And so they had stayed, as a way of denying that they ever had a reason to
wish for far off shores. Now they have each other and that is enough.

They pass girls with
looks like begging on their faces, and only push their hands deeper in their
pockets, unaware. They speak in verse more often than not, quoting poetry or
the plays they’ve memorized and have acted out in real life for their
lovers. They did not live lives out of a story book. They did not marry at
22 or find a little white house in a quaint little neighborhood. They live
in one- or two-bedroom apartments, and sleep three to a bed, saved not by
their maker who made them far less than the perfection they deserve and have
discovered with their minds and bodies (just not in their souls), but saved
by each other. Boys who would die for their friends, and more than just
once, if it meant that one day their broken hearts will pump untainted
blood. The diseases that hide in their veins will one day vanish. Washed up,
rinsed out. Flushed clean.

> BIOGRAPHY
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about the author

Caroline Wilson is an art student at
the University of Louisville and may eventually submit some artwork to us.
We hope she will.